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Ivy League Stripper During her years as a stripper, Heidi Mattson mingled with the likes of loan sharks and their henchmen, saw a colleague's new breast implant slip out...Ivy League StripperNonfiction, MemoirHeidi Mattson During her years as a stripper, Heidi Mattson mingled with the likes of loan sharks and their henchmen, saw a colleague's new breast implant slip out...1995-05-19Arcade

During her years as a stripper, Heidi Mattson mingled with the likes of loan sharks and their henchmen, saw a colleague’s new breast implant slip out during a floor show, and worked alongside a kindergarten teacher, a junkie, and an independently wealthy suburbanite. But most intriguingly, this flat-chested, working-class refugee from rural Maine put herself through Brown University by taking it off. What begins as a job for Mattson becomes a lucrative career, and she writes entertainingly about her adventures in Ivy League Stripper. Anti-intellectual to the core, Mattson gets in over her head when she tries to philosophize about gender and society, defensively invoking Camille Paglia’s reverse sexist fantasy that women’s eros makes them ”the dominant sex.” She’s more convincing as a feminist Horatio Alger who boasts, ”I packaged my biology and turned a profit.” B+